It is common practice to make an electrical connection to a printed circuit board by means of an electrical header assembly which comprises a dielectric housing and a plurality of conductor terminals or pins. The conductor terminals are inserted into longitudinal cavities of the housing. The tail ends are then bent perpendicularly, in many instances over anvil portions of the housing, which locks the conductors in place and provides transversely projecting tails for electrical connection to the printed circuit board when the header assembly is attached. The printed circuit board has a precise pattern of holes which receives the projecting tails which are then soldered or otherwise secured to the printed circuit board to provide a good electrical interface. See, for instance, U.S. Pat. No. 3,864,000.
Another such header is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,491,376 which discloses a header assembly having a thermoplastic housing and two rows of metallic conductor pins is attached to a printed circuit board. The conductor pins have tails which are bent over anvil portions of the housing and project through slots in a locator plate at the conductor end of the housing. The locator plate slots have detents for retaining the bent tails in a pattern to facilitate assembly and soldering of the tails in a matching pattern of holes in the printed circuit board. Stress on the solder connections due to differential thermal expansion is reduced by flexure of the conductor pins in enlarged rearward cavity portions and slippage of the bent tails in the detents.
As described above, known connectors provide for locator plates and means for bending contacts. This is advantageous when the conductor pins of the terminals are to be soldered to the printed circuit board. However, if the conductor pins have compliant contact portions which make electrical connection to the printed circuit boards, the insertion of the pins into the openings of the printed circuit board requires force to be applied to the compliant portions. The locator plates currently used are not capable of cooperating with the compliant portions to provide such a force.
It would be beneficial to provide a pin retention guide for use with headers which provides sufficient force required to facilitate mating of the compliant pins to the circuit board, thereby eliminating the problems noted above. In addition, it would be beneficial to provide a retention guide which is separate from the header but which can easily be inserted onto the pins and mated to the header.